“Pyrr… Let me help you. Let me try to stop Brendel,” I said, my breaths short and uneven.

The Fire Hermessi hesitated, but eventually, he raised an arm, his fire burning brighter for a split second. Suddenly, I felt a string snap somewhere inside me. A string I didn’t even know had been there.

“Go,” he said. “Take your people and go.”

Without hesitation, I roared and dashed across the small battlefield. Putting my weapons away, I grabbed Eira and Raphael by their hands. They looked at me in confusion as I jerked them toward the others. Pyrr expanded into a massive fire ring that surrounded and protected us for the few seconds I needed to get everyone together.

Riza and the Widow Maker pulled Herakles and Eva off the ground. Nethissis helped Varga, and Lumi grabbed Amelia and joined us as we all came together. With our hands linked, I closed my eyes and allowed us all to disintegrate. I understood what the string snapping had been. We’d been tethered to this place by the Hermessi, but we were free now.

I teleported us away from the Hermessi cluster. We reappeared about a hundred miles north of where we’d almost lost this fight. We all collapsed, dropping to our knees and heaving, struggling to breathe normally for once.

My hands were shaking, and my legs had turned to jelly. Eira stayed close, putting an arm around my shoulder. “You’re okay. We made it out of there. All of us,” she said softly.

“Yeah, Tae, thanks for that,” Amelia replied, flat on her back. Raphael sat next to her, using a cloth and healing potions from his backpack to treat her more visible wounds. It didn’t take long for her to spring back up, downright energized and fully healed.

I got up and chugged down half of my volcanic water reserve. I could feel it working on me, its warmth spreading through every fiber of my being. The others did the same, pushing the regeneration process into hyper speed. Back where we’d left the Hermessi, the sky had darkened to a pitch black. Thunderclaps echoed across the fields of gold and green as lightning spread across in flashing lights.

Explosions tore through the plain as Pyrr and the local Hermessi went hard against Brendel’s allies. Fire blossomed in orange, blue, green, and white, everything swallowed by black smoke as the elementals went head to head in a devastating battle. I couldn’t see more from this far, and I was thankful for that.

“We needed this breather.” Lumi sighed, washing her face with some water from her flask. Nethissis drank the rest, closing her eyes for a moment as she enjoyed the healing sensation. The beauty of the volcanic lake water was that it regenerated everything in an organism—wounds and worn-out structures. The tiredness we’d all experienced from such intense fighting had begun to subside.

“Pyrr broke the block they had on us,” I said. “Whatever the Hermessi were using to stop us from teleporting, it’s gone. They’ll use it again, first chance they get, though.”

“How are you feeling?” Eira asked me.

“I’m okay. You?” I replied and glanced around at the crew. “How are you all holding up?”

Herakles groaned as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. He grabbed his volcanic water flask and chugged it, while Riza pressed bandages soaked in healing potions over his thigh wound. The Faulty looked paler than most of us—then again, he’d lost a lot of blood. “I’ll live. For now.”

“I can’t believe they brought Shills out for us, again.” Amelia scoffed, shaking her head.

“I think Pyrr sort of apologized for that,” I said. “He claimed he’d made them before we got here. That all the creatures did was catch our scent and come after us.”

“You know what, I am really confused about that guy,” the Widow Maker replied, hands on his hips, his scythe out of sight. “Why did it take him so long to help us? Is he a sadist? Can a Hermessi be an actual sadist?”

Eva chuckled. “You’ve met Brendel, right?”

“Pyrr is scared,” I said. “He cares about my father the most. He was willing to step on all of us, if that was what it took to save him.”

“What changed his mind?” Raphael asked, raising an eyebrow. “We were all a little too busy fighting for our lives to pay attention to your conversation.”

I smiled, inwardly thrilled to see them all conscious and rapidly recovering. Our quest had just begun, after all. I needed each of us in tip-top shape, especially since we had no idea what the release of Zetos would require.

“I told him about Derek and Sofia’s mission,” I said. It got me scowls from Varga and Lumi.

“Now, why would you do that, Tae?” Varga grumbled. “What if they go after them, now?!”

I shook my head. “He helped us. Don’t you see? He let us go, basically. He’s fighting the other Hermessi as we speak. He’d have told them about Derek and Sofia while they pummeled us into mush back there, if he wanted to stop us.”

“Sherus is on Yahwen, isn’t he?” Lumi murmured, her eyes glimmering as she put two and two together, like I had, earlier.

“It’s where Brendel keeps the other Hermessi children. In her mind, it’s probably the most secure place for them,” I said.

I let Amelia pass on all the information we’d gathered to my mother through the group’s Telluris link, and to Phoenix via the comms system. She mentioned my father’s Hermessi heritage briefly, and it came as an understandable shock to my mother, but Amelia also mentioned that I’d have a more in-depth conversation about this later and in private. There simply wasn’t enough time to go over all the details now.

Amelia had taken it upon herself to be our liaison to GASP when we were all together, to simplify the communication lines during field missions such as this. It was easier, since she was able to play down some of the damage we’d sustained, knowing that my mother was worried sick about me, in particular.

“Who were you talking to earlier?” I asked the Widow Maker. It caught him by surprise, and he stared at me, quietly, for about half a minute.

“What do you mean?” He answered with a question, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“During combat. You told someone that ‘now’s the time to step in’ or something similar,” I replied, eyeing him carefully. I didn’t want to risk pushing the wrong button with this guy. He was a very old Reaper and a free agent. Nothing stopped him from walking away, if he chose to. I doubted he was still attached enough to any type of moral code. We were doing all this because it was the right thing to do, and the Widow Maker had probably met and reaped many others with similar intentions.

I had a sense that he viewed time and existence much differently from the rest of us, given his absolute immortality.

“Oh, I was talking to Herakles,” the Widow Maker quipped. “He was kind of sluggish. It annoyed me.”

Herakles glowered at him, and I didn’t buy the Widow Maker’s answer, anyway. “Dude, I was busy getting cut down,” the Faulty snapped. “Pardon me if I’m not a badass Reaper like yourself.”

“Not sure how badass he really is.” Raphael chuckled. “Since he barely held his own back there.”

The Widow Maker waved him off. “I told you, I’m no longer bound to Eirexis, and, therefore, my powers are no longer amplified by it. Plus, there were so many of those elemental creeps out there.”

“Then stop railing on me!” Herakles replied. “I did the best I could with what I had.”

“It wasn’t enough,” the Widow Maker said. I had a feeling he was drawing attention in the wrong direction, just so I wouldn’t follow up on my question and further probe for the truth.

“What you did wasn’t enough either, but it was the best you had,” Riza shot back, reducing him to an awkward silence.

“That’s it!” Lumi burst and got up. She glowed white with anger, and I knew there was still enough mojo in her to whip our asses unless we got back in line. “Cut it out. All of you,” she added and looked at the Widow Maker. “If you don’t want to tell us who it was you were talking to back there, that’s fine. My guess is it was another Reaper, but until he or she manifests, we’ll never know. But please don’t disparage others in the crew simply because you cannot be truthful.”

I chuckled softly, pleased to see her eloquence demolish the Widow Maker with just a handful of sharply directed sentences. But she glanced at me next, and I broke into a cold sweat almost instantly, as if getting her attention in these circumstances wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “And you,” she continued. “What is Eirexis telling you? We need to get the hell out of here before the Hermessi catch up with us.”

Lumi was right. We’d been through hell, and we’d just escaped it. Spending another moment here would hurl us back into it. Nethissis prepared another modified travel spell as I took out Eirexis and pointed it in different directions.

“North. We head north,” I said, as Lumi and Nethissis prepared to steer the light bubble that formed around us.

We eventually reached the ocean, while I kept Pyrr and the other Hermessi of the Fire Star in my mind, hoping they continued to keep the others at bay. His was the only help we had, and we needed it, desperately, if we were to reach Zetos.

The spell flew above the water, waves foaming beneath us. Eirexis was basically a stick of white light in my hand, now.

“Okay, we are definitely close,” I said, staring at it. Its temperature rose, the warmth seeping through my skin as I looked at Lumi and Nethissis. “I think we should slow down.”

“It’s got to be underwater,” Herakles mused, glancing around.

We were far from the shore, already, and all there was to see was the vast expanse of dark blue water beneath the clear sky. The storms concentrated somewhere far away from the south, where we’d left the Hermessi fighting. We’d put at least five hundred more miles between us and them, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they’d find us again.

“Thank you for stating the obvious,” Raphael shot back, giving Herakles a cold grin.